Now there is reports that the government through the Department of Homeland Security has secret directive that they will allow searches and seizures of goods and items if they are within 100 miles of the border. Of course, their reasons are to “stop illegal immigration.”

For those of you who are not asleep this is how the Bill of Rights now stands:

Amendment I: The government has dictated on numerous occasions that the media cannot report on certain things. They are talking about editing media so that there is “less violence.” We also cannot peacefully convene around any government building, monument, meeting, at the White House, etc – we must peacefully convene in designated areas and we are foreced to stay in those designated areas by police, SWAT, and military personnel with advanced weapons, shields, and armor.

Amendment II: We are not allowed to own guns and if we are we must received permission to own them. Not all firearms are legal to own. Some governments are trying to seize assets of gun manufacturers and the rest of them are simply regulated to the max.

Amendment III: As of right now, I don’t know of any government agents being quartered in personal homes. Instead we simply pay the Pentagon bulk sums of money and we pay for their housing to be built.

Amendment IV: There are “Constitution-free” zones that allow the government to search and seize your property without probable cause. Police routinely stop citizens under false-pretenses to meet quotas and for government revenue. During times of crisis – natural or man-made – the government has gone door to door and forced people to stay inside or consficated food/water/firearms.

Amendment V: I don’t know of any double jeaopardy, but we do have the criminal vs civil lawsuits ruining plenty of lives.

Amendment VI: Trial of all accused of criminal charges is gone. The government has already publically assasinated three American citizens abroad and have considered that assasinating an American citizen on American soil is a valid option.

Amendment VII: I’m unaware of anyone not being allowed trial for matters of this sort.

Amendment VII: I’m not sure what excessive bail is considered, but I often hear of bails being hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. I’d call this excessive. As for cruel and unusual punishment, I’d say much of our military practices, Gitmo, and the other secret camps we have are all cruel punishment and are a virtual black hole. I believe that American citizens as well as foreigners have landed in these cells.

Amendment IX: The 9th is absolutely destroyed. We are ruled by special interest groups or mob rule. Nothing is retained by the people and the government creates powers for itself that the people never had in the first place.

Amendment X: State rights. For years the states have ceded their power to the Federal government. There is some glimmer of hope that many states are fighting back and blocking federal power encroachment.

Americans have no Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures if they happen to be within 100 miles of the border, according to the “Executive Summary” of a still-secret report by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As the ACLU-created map above shows, nearly 2/3 of Americans (197 million people)—including the entire populations of Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, and Michigan—live in this “Constitution free” zone, as do the residents of the nation’s five most populous cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia.

The secret report is DHS’s response (two years late) to critics of its policy, in place since at least 2008, of allowing border control agents, without a warrant or even a suspicion of wrongdoing, to search any travelers’ electronic devices (laptops, cell phones, tablets, cameras, etc.) and seize data they find. According to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) filed three years ago by the ACLU, DHS subjected more than 6,500 travelers—nearly half of them U.S. citizens—to searches under this policy between October 2008 and June 2010.

The Executive Summary of the secret report, which DHS is allowing the public to see, sets forth its conclusions without even summarizing the reasoning underlying them. Thus it asserts that “imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” but is silent on how DHS defines “civil rights/civil liberties benefits” or how it balances these against its institutional needs.

The ACLU, which has already filed an FOIA request demanding the full report, released a statement arguing that “allowing government agents to search through all of a traveler’s data without reasonable suspicion is completely incompatible with our fundamental rights: our Fourth Amendment right to privacy—and more specifically the right to be free from unreasonable searches—is implicated when the government can rummage through our computers and cell phones for no reason other than that we happen to have traveled abroad. Suspicionless searches also open the door to profiling based on perceived or actual race, ethnicity, or religion. And our First Amendment rights to free speech and free association are inhibited when agents at the border can target us for searches based on our exercise of those rights.”

-Matt Bewig

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